collection

I was interviewed for a computer collecting feature for The Wall Street Journal several months back, and the piece finally hit both the newspaper and online today. While neither of my two contributed photos made it in (which I've included below) due in part to a slight change in direction of the piece, several of my quotes still made it in. While I wish the piece was a bit longer (as I thought originally planned), I'm still heartened by the positive coverage this segment of our industry has gotten in a quality publication. Check it out online here. Photos below:

A small view around the gameroom - not a proper tour but more a bit of a test and a looksee of the room as it was around August 14 2012
Music used: 'Gator Drive' by Nigel Glocker & Roger Adams - provided by YouTube & created using YouTube Video Editor

BillWhile casual photos and videos are fine for posting something quickly, sometimes readers want a bit more quality. While I'm not going to put a lot of effort into these per se, i.e., you won't mistake these for studio quality, I will take a bit more care in taking and posting anything in this particular series. For this first entry, I focused on three of the most recent additions to my collection, Tomy's electro-mechanical tabletop, Daring Driver, Commodore's Gorf for the C-64, and the 2012 Ultima Collector's Guide. Enjoy:

Woot! recently had a deal on an 8GB Eye-Fi memory card that I took advantage of for the express purpose of no-brainer automatic photo uploads from my digital camera directly to my Flickr account, which I thought would provide a smoother and higher quality workflow than using my iPhone 4. As such, I set the Eye-Fi up last night and took some very casual photos. While the transfer process really didn't go well (I'll need to experiment a bit more), transferring only two photos correctly and requiring me to manually transfer the rest, the end result was still some photos of recent items in my collection that also happened to be in my staging area, which I decided to share below with some minor commentary so the initial work wouldn't be totally wasted. Enjoy:

As any hardcore videogame and computer collector knows, there are many intriguing classic systems out there worthy of your time that never made it to your home territory. One of the biggest challenges when importing vintage systems from foreign countries is having the necessary hardware on hand to convert either or both of the power (voltage) and video (television standard) connections.

With vintage Japanese systems in the US, it's fairly trivial to use those systems here. Generally speaking, the video signal is the same - though you may have to tune in a weird channel if you're stuck using an RF connection - and power requirements are similar, generally 100-110v to our 110-120v. While you can usually get away with just plugging a Japanese system direct into a US outlet, a simple power converter is still recommended in some situations. With vintage European systems, it's not nearly as straightforward, since they use a completely different television standard and power requirements usually run 220-240v, so you need to do double conversions. On top of that, plugs for both video and power are often unusual shapes and may require yet another adapter.

As mentioned in the Panoramas of my Main Videogame and Computer Collection Storage Areas, I decided to also take video. Below are those videos, in obnoxious 1080p hi-def glory. The first video is just over 17 minutes long, and the second video is almost 15 minutes long. It's basically just me prattling on about this and that and about as dry as the worst of bad museum tours, but it's good to do these things every couple of years to see where everything is at. Hopefully two years from now I'll be even better organized and have leaned the collection out a bit.

Following Mark Vergeer's 360 degree tour of his game room back in December using 360 Panorama for his iPhone, I decided to finally give it a try myself on my own iPhone. It was awkward considering there is no good central place to stand and the lighting is not great, but I guess it gives some idea of what is going on. I think I'll follow this up with a guided video tour, since I'm long overdue for one anyway. Panoramas follow:

OK, it's not really 1,001 boxed computer games, it's actually 1,035 as of this writing by my best cataloging efforts (hopefully not missing more than a couple), but 1,001 has a certain literary ring to it... Here's the link. Anyway, this has taken me months of free time here and there to inventory. I just stuck to basics - Game, Platform(s), Publisher(s), Box Type (I winged that) and Genre (winged that too). This is ONLY boxed computer software - no videogames (consoles or handhelds), and only stuff that was commercially released (or at least appears to be). Inventorying my boxed videogame collection will take another long period of time independent of this. General photos of the computer software on their shelves, is here. Finally, the list of systems currently in my collection is here. A high percentage of those computer systems listed, both common and rare, have representation in my boxed software collection.

So, why do I bring this up? Simple. I'm taking requests. It's very important for me to share my collection in as many ways as possible and this is certainly one way to do it. Do you want to see photos of the box and insides? Would you like a review? Would you like a simple overview? Screenshots? It doesn't matter as I'll try to accommodate it in a structured, orderly manner. Of course, requesting something like Archon or Elite would be rather silly, since information on those is readily available and redundant--requests for coverage of common items really doesn't do anyone any good, does it? Let's try to make it interesting and useful for everyone.

Well, after going almost a year after moving into a bigger house, I've finally finished unpacking my whole collection of vintage and modern computer and videogame systems, software, literature and more. I didn't bother to go into much photographic detail or move anything on the shelves (or describe anything in the photos at this point - sorry). Some point soon, I"ll do a video feature on this stuff, then begin to go into much greater detail with articles and in-depth video features. Regardless, this is a huge weight off my back to finally get this stuff out to a reasonable point of access for me. Just in time too, as I needed to start taking photos again for my upcoming book anyway and the publisher all but threatened to take a hit out on me...

The list of my systems here, where yes, I do stretch the definition a bit of what constitutes a "system".